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Sunday, November 1, 2015

Brave new Dystopia

President Barack Obama might be
remembered by some for doing some good on the home front and for having
signaled an important milestone in the ongoing Afro-American struggle for civil
rights in this country, but, on the international stage, the desperate and
cynical attempts by a variety of “realist” spin doctors to rebrand failure
notwithstanding, he will remembered as the man who broke the global order.

True, blame in this regard should
actually be borne by each administration since the end of the Cold War, but it
was Obama who delivered the knockout blow. He began doing so when he
misdiagnosed America’s problem on the international scene as too much intervention,
then, proceeded to prescribe a variety of remedies that backfired, including
cynical retrenchment, cynical engagement, reset buttons and pivots away from
where the big problems lie and where he drew ghost red lines to where he has
absolutely no idea what is happening or what to do.

As the world’s only superpower
par excellence, and even if in certain regions its power is bound to be
challenged, one way or another, for better or worse, America does have a
responsibility to maintain a certain of balance between the requirements of
advancing human rights and democracy, goals that are clearly stated in the UN
Charter, and maintaining global peace, another one of UN’s goal. In the
aftermath of the Rawanda Genocide, and the Balkan Wars, a new international legal
agreement was reached, the Responsibility to Protect, that clearly criminalized
the kind of mass slaughter we are witnessing in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan and Central
Africa Republic, among other places, and clearly called on the international
community to undertake the necessary action to stop it, including military
action.

Since the beginning of the Syrian
Revolution back in March 2011, the Obama Administration remained committed to a
course of action that virtually relegated R2P to the dustbin of history, and
set the clock back on human rights and democracy promotion. With this, a UN
that was beginning to feel its way towards relevance relapsed into an
uninspiring caricature of the uninspired caricature it once was. Welcome to
Brave New Dystopia we have always dreaded, and wanted only to experience
through science fiction novels, movies and TV programs.

The challenges facing an American
President on the international scene are never easy, and they won’t be anytime
soon. But ever since the end of WWII, retrenchment has ceased to be a viable
option. The challenge might have even become one of intervention management
rather than avoidance. This is a perpetual battle indeed which requires a
strong military component and a willingness to undertake actions that may prove
unpopular, both at home and abroad. But the cost of all this remains far more
manageable than those resulting from the creation of geopolitical vacuums only
to have them filled by all the wrong elements. True, your enemies might get
sucked in and defeated at first, but, sooner or later, so will you: Afghanistan
as a case in point. It defeated the Russians, and now it is defeating the Americans.
Interventions and conflict management are costly but possible. Chaos
management, on the other hand, is an exercise in futility. But this is exactly
what happens when we shirk our responsibilities, and insist on firmly shutting
our eyes to avoid accepting the ugliness of the reality we created, or allowed
to be created.

Avoiding war at any cost in a
world where there are still so many powers unwilling to do the same and so many
autocrats still willing to engage in mass slaughter is hardly a realistic or
noble choice. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights acknowledges the
right of people to engage in an armed insurrection against an oppressive
government.

“…Whereas it is
essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to
rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected
by the rule of law…” –UDHR:
Preamble

Wars might become obsolete one
day, and that will be a happy day indeed. But in order to get us there, we need
to ensure that UN Charter goals are largely achieved and UDHR ideals are
largely fulfilled. This calls for engagement, for democracy promotion, for
pushing a human rights agenda, and for standing up to dictators, especially
when they are willing to do the kinds of things Bashar Al-Assad has been
willing to for the last 5 years. In fact, it would be much better to try to
preempt such a possibility by calling him early in the game, by drawing real
red lines and be willing to enforce them. Obama has done none of that, and
Bernie Sanders and Paul Rand are promising none of that.

Enough with electing foolish
renegades who promise us the sun and the moon only to deliver Hades! America
and the world beyond need an American leader who won’t run away just because
the battle is tough, and who won’t conflate democratic leadership with
submission to the popular will at every step. The people are not always right,
and there are times when a good democratic leader has to challenge their
“wisdom,” and ask for their trust as he leads them in a direction that is
different from what most of them might have wanted or expected at one point.

As for that inherent fear of
fuckups that some may possess, it should be noted that the risk of fucking up
are no less serious even in the case of retrenchment and inaction. This is an
inherent risk that comes with leadership. Good leaders know well that this is
among the many risks that they have to accept and find ways to manage if they
are to be successful, credible, and capable of inspiring awe. This world is
still full of thugs, and thugs are bad at "calculus," and their
deductive skills leave much to be desired. Without a real show of force, they
will never change their ways.

So long as there are people like
Bashar Al-Assad and his clique, people willing to turn against their own and
perpetrate mass slaughter in order to stay in power; and so long that there
exists countries and rulers elsewhere willing to support them and to justify
their actions, we may not have much of a choice about engaging in warfare,
perennial or not.

A casual perusal of Palestinian
and pro-Palestinians Facebook accounts and websites reveals a rather disturbing
phenomenon, more so to me because I am an Arab and I do support Palestinian
rights. Still, it is distressing to see how the same Palestinians who are busy
deploring Israeli violence against them and posting videos showcasing Israeli
soldiers doing their worst, also celebrate the random "stabbing
operations" carried by Palestinian youths against Israelis. Occasionally,
they even accuse “the Jews" of staging scenes of their “innocent” victims
by putting knives beside them to justify their murder, something that might
have happened in some cases, but since they themselves celebrate certain
“stabbing operations,” it is clear that they know that it doesn’t happen in
every case. So, they deplore Israeli violence and racism while celebrating
their own, and accusing Israelis of staging it, while knowing that, in most
cases, this accusation is nothing more than a blatant lie! How Kaforwedian
(Kafkaesque, Orwellian and Dickensian)!

The Palestinians have to be
better than this, they have to be morally superior to the people occupying
their land and denying their basic rights; otherwise they will keep on giving
birth to leaders who will turn against them as well, adding another layer of
oppression to their lives against which they have to fight. They need to be
morally superior and to reflect this in their actions of resistance; otherwise
they will end up justifying their own oppression, in effect making their
enemies’ case for them. In fact, this is already happening, and has been for a
couple of decades now. The fact of the occupation in itself does not provide
much of a moral high ground, and will not get the critical global support and
the domestic sympathy among Israelis without which the Palestinian struggle is
lost.

So even if Palestinians cannot
bring themselves to love the ethics of nonviolence for their sake, they should
embrace them because these ethics are the best tool in their possession as they
continue to struggle for their right, be it in the form of one- or two-state
solution.

I can understand why there is so
much frustration and anger, the Israeli forces of occupation, Israeli settlers
and rightwing fanatics of all stripes are creating conditions that can only
foster such a development, but that does not justify embracing it, nor does
excuse the Palestinian leader’s boundless moral cowardice and opportunism when
face with it. No one has hurt the Palestinian cause more than the Palestinians themselves.
The same probably goes for the Syrian revolutionaries as well.

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World